NICE JOB: Pararmount, home to hits like “Mission Impossible”(above), is landing as box office king for 2011David James

Brad Grey must feel like the king of the world.

The Paramount Pictures boss, finishing up his seventh year atop the 100-year-old studio, finds his movie house the box-office champ of 2011 — the first time it has finished first in Hollywood in more than a decade.

A whopping $46.2 million in ticket sales over the holiday weekend for “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” helped Paramount all but lock up the No. 1 box-office position with $1.86 billion in tickets sold to its films through Dec. 25.

The strong performance of the Tom Cruise film helped hold off Time Warner’s Warner Bros., the box-office champ the past four years, whose take stands at $1.76 billion.

“These are like two big behemoths duking it out, like Godzilla and King Kong, and they both generated a ton of money in a tough year,” Paul Dergarabedian, president of Hollywood.com’s box-office division, told Bloomberg News.

Still, Dergarabedian warned that overall ticket sales have been lacking this year, and estimates 1.269 billion tickets will have been sold in 2011, the fewest since 1995, when 1.264 billion were sold.

Sony Pictures is in third place with $1.3 billion in US and Canadian sales, including $142.6 million in ticket sales for “The Smurfs.”

Walt Disney Co. came in fourth place with $1.2 billion in revenue, led by $241.1 million from “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” according to Box Office Mojo.

Even though Warner Bros. is on track to come in second place this year, it still wins the title for the industry’s top-grossing movie of 2011 with “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.”

It took in $381 million domestically.

The second-biggest hit was Paramount’s “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” which grossed $352.4 million in US and Canadian ticket sales, according to Box Office Mojo.

For Grey, the victory couldn’t be sweeter, as it comes just before his 54th birthday tomorrow.